


Remember Little Things

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Sally Face (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, But also, Character Study, Fluff, Gen, Memories, School Projects, ahahaha I'm so sorry, spoilers up to the end of episode three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-09-26
Packaged: 2019-07-17 17:59:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16100855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: … Cause it’s the little things that hold a person together, sometimes.





	Remember Little Things

**Author's Note:**

> Hi~ Thanks very much for reading, if you do, and I hope you enjoy the fic! :D Hopefully it came out okay. Ahhhh, this game is amazing...! I only just caught up recently, and dang I'm excited for the next episode. 
> 
> Have a great day!

They had shredded the newspaper for a school project, back then.  Sal remembered it, now, so clearly it made him feel sick...  Stirred up his stomach, you know, raw like tears in the back of his throat.  They had been making a diorama with cardboard and plastic dollar store toys – with Larry’s paint set and a lot of dripping papier-mâché.

Sal had soaked the trailing newspaper scraps in the papier-mâché goo, squeezing the extra glue stuff off and then passing them on to Larry.  Larry’d shaped the crumbling house around a couple small and sagging boxes from when Sal had moved in however many months back, with no real plan to work from.  The thing was taking shape one piece at a time.  Becoming real, still printed with newspaper stories and sliced-up comics and faces Sal didn’t expect to recognize.  It would have vaulted windows, by the end of things, and a spiral staircase coiling up one of the toilet paper roll towers.  All the newsprint would be painted over and sealed with some gross-smelling spray stuff, so it didn’t flake off on anybody’s desk.

It never occurred to Sal that he’d hold newspapers with his own name on them, someday too soon – Sal’s own picture staring back like a stranger, like a threat or a promise or a sort of unmaking he would find hard to put into words even to himself.  It never occurred to him that he’d crumple a newspaper like that up in shaking fists, and if he managed to shred it _then_ – well, building something new would be the last thing on his mind.  There’d be battles to fight, now, and truths to tell, and there would be so many eyes on him all the time…  People thinking they knew all they needed to know about Sal Fisher – Sally Face – but seeing somebody else whenever they looked at him.

Maybe even people he loved would see a new, stranger Sally Face in him, then, if one newspaper report in particular was anything to go by.

Sal felt like he was getting pulled farther down a drain so, so often.  Down and down and down.

That diorama had been for “The Fall of the House of Usher,” right?  Everybody’d been assigned different short stories in lit class, and Larry had built the house already broken, collapsing in on itself with a big rip right in the middle of its cardboard moving-box heart.  Built broken; built already getting swallowed back into the earth...  Or, you know, into the slab of cardboard they’d named “The Earth” and propped that ruined little world up on.   Ash had painted the world around the house in lonely greys and sunset purples, all mixed in with a heavy stain like drying blood.  Sal had watched her work, for a minute, and accidentally started readjusting the strap on his prosthetic face before realizing he still had papier-mâché glop on his hand.  Dammit.

He and Todd had mostly focused on the essay-writing portion of that particular assignment, Sal remembered, but it was honestly a lot of fun helping out with everything else, too.  Ash and Larry had both assured him they wouldn’t mind if he flopped over and played a video game while they worked, or something – or just hung out with them, really, providing commentary or eating a snack from the barely-stocked vending machine in the hall –  but Sal’d said, no, no.  This was fine.  This was perfect.

The day was still so fresh and certain in his mind, even as it drifted farther and farther away: they’d propped Larry’s door to the outside world open to help filter out the papier-mâché glue smells, and Sal knew he’d been able to see the corner of Larry and his father’s treehouse from where he was sitting.   The breeze had been crisp and just a little bit cold; the sun would start mulling over the pros and cons of setting soon, but not quite yet.  A little chilly light had caught in Ash’s hair as she leaned over to paint another tree…  Larry had somehow managed to get paint all over his jeans, but he still grabbed a paper towel to wipe glue out of Sal’s pigtail instead of scrubbing at his own clothes.  He kept going, “Oh hey!  Just a second…” and wandering over to change the music they were all listening to.  Showing them both new songs, drawling about upcoming concerts he’d been looking at ticket prices for – stuff like that, as crinkly dead leaves rustled around outside and dark birds circled above them all.

Addison Apartments – their building with its nervous ghosts and its dripping noxious pipes and its sealed-off blood rooms and meat lockers – had been sick deep inside long before Sal got there, of course.  Coming unraveled; full of secrets.  The House of Usher itself might have been able to relate, actually.  What they’d stumbled into was rotten all through, and they had wandered in so, so deep –

Ha.  It felt like Sal’s world kept finding new and interesting ways to fall apart, lately, but he held onto little moments like that one whenever he could.  If he couldn’t remember tossing his head back to laugh at something Larry said, anymore…  Knowing neither of his friends would be able to see his smile through that prosthetic face but _also_ knowing they saw him and his expressions, his tics and his laughter, better than he knew his own self sometimes…  That would feel a little like letting his real life drift away, maybe.  That would feel like forgetting Larry, Larry the way he’d really, truly been, and the way Sal still loved him like family.  Forgetting Ash as he’d known her, and Todd – Todd before he was changed.

Sal had to remember when he’d had a home with his dad and their cat, Gizmo – when he’d had a second home in the basement with Larry and his mom, safe and chosen and trusted in a way no one alive seemed to trust him, now.  Not with everything, _everything_ that had crumbled around him like their House of Usher model when they’d stomped it in during their final presentation in front of the class.  Not when he was wearing that orange jumpsuit, with all those murder charges leveled at him and getting monologued about on TV.

Sal summoned up his softer memories when he needed them, letting a left-behind life play out as he nodded along to the prison guards or watched an ant scurry up the wall of his cell.  They were always waiting for him, so far, those memories: school projects and pizza dinners in the basement while his dad was gone…  Halloween costume planning sessions and scouting around for ghosts with his Super GearBoy and Larry close behind.  Movie marathons where Sal sometimes ended up asleep in a nest of blankets on Larry’s floor, too – you know.  His glass eye would feel strange in the morning, if he didn’t soak it in its faithful cup of contact lens solution by his bed…  But every so often, Sal stirred awake in the middle of the night to find the TV screen dissolved into crackly static and Larry collapsed a couple feet away, desperately in need of someone to prop a pillow up under his head.  Carefully.  Slowly, so Larry could keep on sleeping.

Moments like that were real.  Little things, maybe, but they came together piece by piece to make a world.  Before the “Sally Face Killer,” there had been “Sally Face the Affectionate Nickname”…  Or, really, the nickname reclaimed from bullies at Sal’s old school; the nickname he’d learned to wear until it felt like a friendly nudge in the ribs, or a wink.  His friends had said stuff like, “Here – a water bottle.  Catch, Sally Face!” and “G’morning, Sally Face.  I hope you got some actual sleep.”

Remembering all that might’ve made Sal sick, sometimes – might’ve made his good eye burn and his breath choke – but he held on just the same.  What else could he do?

Sal and his friends had shredded the newspaper for a school project, way back when, and they’d had a stapled copy of their group essay already waiting in Sal’s backpack.  That was something Sal reminded himself to believe in, and so were all the memories that came after, whether anyone believed them or not.  That was real, and so was the version of Sally Face Sal had always tried his best to be.


End file.
